No Win No Fee Compensation Claims

The introduction of No Win No fee claims opened new doors in claiming for personal injury compensation. It meant that thousands of people who were injured in an accident no longer needed to worry about affording legal representation when making their claim.

The term ‘No Win No Fee’ is another way to describe a Conditional Fee Agreement (CFA). The CFA is an agreement made between a lawyer and a client when a claim for personal injury compensation is taken on. The agreement itself sets out terms which protect the client from having to pay for legal costs if they were to lose their claim for personal injury compensation.

With the introduction of No Win No Fee came new rules to legal costs. Lawyers who now take on No Win No Fee cases are entitled to charge success fees – which are taken from the 3rd party (the side that caused the personal injury). Clients are now not charged legal costs from their compensation award. Instead the compensation is awarded and legal costs are an addition to this payment. This is where you hear the term 100% compensation.

No Win No Fee cases were introduced to stop government legal aid covering costs of personal injury accidents. Only now in exceptional circumstances is legal aid used to cover those injured in an accident. However, government authorities such as the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) and the Motor Insurers Bureau (MIB) still help pay for injuries sustained by victims of criminal assault and being hit by uninsured drivers.

No Win No Fee personal injury compensation has had its critics. One of the major authorities to criticise the system over recent years has been the NHS, who claim that No Win No Fee cases end up in them forking out much more than they used to on legal costs when they lose medical negligence cases. The Welsh Health Minister Edwina Hart banned all Personal Injury Claim company literature from the confines of NHS buildings, saying they were “highly inappropriate.”

However, even the NHS are now using a No Win No Fee compensation company, as they struggle to recover millions of pounds in money fraudulently taken from their system by private companies, dentists and doctors who claim for more medical funding than they are entitled to.

The No Win No Fee system is not there to be exploited. It’s there to help those who may not have been able to afford legal cover without it, and it’s there to help people get the justice and money they deserve following an accident that wasn’t their fault. Compensation can help put those suffering from an injury on the road to recovery.